Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/304

292 of the Conquest;" "National Policy of William;" "Introduction of Feudal Usages;" "Maintenance of Old Forms;" "Results of Changes of Administrators;" "Subordinate Changes: in Judicature, in Taxation, in Ecclesiastical Affairs;" "Transitional Character of the Period."

We are citing an author who is among the least liable to the charge of belonging to the former of the two types just indicated. We are not criticising his work, but abstracting from it, for purposes of illustration, a series of familiar topics which may be treated by either of two contrasted methods. On the one hand, if the items in the series were treated by the one type of historian, a minimum of relationship would appear between either of them and the others, or anything else. Each topic would be discussed very much as a landscape painter snatches from an environment an "effect" and puts it on canvass. Volumes full of such detached, impressionistic sketches would go no farther toward making a science of history than an equal bulk of description of detached pieces of rock, culled from different parts of the world, would go toward making a science of geology. No one with the least impulse toward generalization can imagine that information of that fragmentary sort is science. It may be worth getting for other purposes than science, and individuals may be as well within their rights in busying themselves with this sort of litter, as those who really devote themselves to science. In itself, left in the uncriticised, unorganized, heterogeneous condition of facts set side by side, with no discrimination of relative worth, information about the past is of no more scientific value than the same number of miscellaneous items in the newspaper today.

In the modern literature classed as "history" we accordingly find quaint and curious information in all stages of organization, from a minimum to a maximum of coherence. Our argument is that sociology has no part nor lot with the type of history which is content to find out facts and there rest its case. Like all genuine science, sociology is not interested in facts as such. It is interested only in relations, meanings, valuations, in which facts reappear in essentials. One fact is worth no more than another, if its